As the first day of the Main Event at TI7 moved into its dreaded best-of-one lower bracket phase, Cloud 9 would suffer the fate of being eliminated from the tournament.
With elimination on the cards for either one of these teams, the stakes were high as they went into the best-of-1 lower bracket match-up to see who would survive day one of TI7’s main event. Both teams were known for playing some of the longest Dota 2 games when it comes to both TI and in general – so this was set to be extremely interesting and intense. Neither team wanting to be knocked out from The International this early, they would fight to the bitter end, but unfortunately for one of them, they would have to surrender to the early Lower Bracket elimination.
From the drafting alone, Cloud 9 were ready to push through their opponents and win – while inversely Team Empire looked to pick heroes to directly fight into C9, but the Arc Warden from Jacky ‘EternalEnvy’ Mao would be the something to watch.
With just over two minutes passed, C9 claimed first blood – ensuring an early kill on Vladimir 'RodjER' Nikogosyan's Nightstalker. By 10 minutes, both teams were still neck to neck, both constantly rotating around the map and securing great kills. Ten minutes later, the game remained quite even, even though C9 retained an extremely small tower and gold advantage, Empire were enjoying the kill lead at 7-4. The game saw a bit of action during this period as both teams made some excellent turn-around plays to claim a few vital kills and while C9 came out ahead in these skirmishes, the game remained in the balance.
It was Team Empire, who seemed to take advantage of this and swing everything into their own favour, as things seemed to start to fall apart for C9. With just under forty minutes passed, Team Empire claimed an aegis before finding vital kills on the Dire’s cores as Roman 'Resolut1on' Fomynok tore through his enemies with Faceless Void. The Radiant squad began to choke their opponent’s out of the game, starving them of farm and leaving them locked in their base.
Empire found the perfect engagement, which lead to them claiming the tier 3 tower in the bottom lane, opening up the shrines to destruction and leading them to a second aegis. While the Dire were able to hold off the next attack from Empire, it seemed as though the Radiant were ready to send C9 home and as the hour mark loomed on the horizon, so did the fate of EE-Sama’s TI dreams.
With another aegis in hand, Empire ripped through their opponent, forcing out buybacks as they attempted to defend their base from destruction. As the mid and bottom lane barracks were destroyed, there was no hope left in sight for the Dire, who called GG.
With that, Team Empire keep their tournament dreams alive, but crushed those of Cloud 9, eliminating them from TI7. Empire will now move on to face the daunting task of fighting Evil Geniuses in a best-of-3 elimination match tomorrow.
